UNITY IN ACTION:
PERSONS, COMMUNITY AND ·ECUMENISM
IN THE THOUGHT OF JOHN MACMURRAY
By GERARD McCABE
Submittedin partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Theology in the School of Theology of the Faculty of Human and Management Sciences, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg.
University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg November 2002
SUPERVISOR: Professor Neville Richardson
DECLARATION
I hereby state that the whole dissertation, except where specifically indicated to the contrary, ismy own original work.
Gerard McCabe
Signed
Pietermaritzburg November 2002
As supervisor,I haveagreedtothe submission ofthis dissertation.
ProfessorRNeville Richardson
Signed_ _
~
_ _~~
' l7_~ _
Pietermaritzburg November 2002
ABSTRACT
As both a philosopher and a Christian, John Macmurray (1891-1976), spent his life attempting to show that we are truly called to a life of unity with one another. He makes a strong philosophical case that to be properly human is to seek and to intend communion with others, and in his analysis of the nature of the human person he offers uS a way of understanding that the call to Christian unity is not simply a matter of pastoral effectiveness but one that expresses the deepest truth of our human being, that we are most fully ourselves when we are in communion with one another.
The call to unity among the Christian Churches is one that has largely shaped pastoral and theological concerns over the last hundred years or more. The efforts of the World Council of Churches and the writings of many eminent theologians have pushed the question of ecumenism to the forefront of Christian consciousness. It is now generally recognised among Christians of all traditions that the failure of the Churches to give practical expression of the unity for which Christ prayed is itself a major obstacle to the proclamation of the Good News, and one that inhibits the message of Jesus from being properly heard and accepted by many who are seeking
meaning in their lives.
In terms of how best to achieve the unity that so many desire, there has long been a divide between those who argue that unity should come about through doctrinal agreement and those who say that, while doctrine tends to divide Christians, unity can be best achieved through a shared commitment to practical efforts to make the world a more peaceful, just and loving place.
Something, however, that has been largely overlooked in the whole ecumenical question is the need to find an appropriate philosophical basis for unity among peoples and among the Churches. Without such a philosophical underpinning, the call to unity can easily be seen as simply a practical pastoral tool for the effective proclamation of the Gospel or as nothing other than emotive rhetoric. In the writings ofJohn Macmurray we·
are able to find an approach to the question of ecumenism that provides us with just such a philosophical basis for unity.
This dissertation engages in a close reading of both Macmurray's philosophical and religious views, and suggests that, despite some inconsistencies in his own approach, Macmurray offers the whole
ecumenical project a significant philosophical basis for the notion that in seeking unity among the Christian Churches we are being faithful to our nature as human beings. While not denying the sincerity of the countless numbers of those who have committed themselves to the call for unity among Christians, the desire for unity needs to be fortified by an appropriate understanding of human nature. It is. argued that the ecumenical movement can be greatly enhanced by the kind of perspective that Macmurray brings to the whole question ofunity. His voice still needs to be heard.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE
THE CRISIS OF THE PERSONAL
The Crisis in Contemporary Philosophy Romanticism, Kant and Descartes
The Person As Agent
Thinking as Reflective Activity
CHAPTER TWO
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF COMMUNION Relationships and Intentionality
Fear and Love Modes ofMorality Society and Community
CHAPTER THREE
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RELIGION The Inclusive Nature ofReligion The Universal Other
Real and Unreal Religion A Personal God
1
3 20
20
20 26
41 44
52
52 52 56 62 65
74
74
76
80
82
90
CHAPTER FOUR
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS The Ambiguity ofChristianity
The Importance ofJudaism for Christianity The Teaching ofJesus
The Failure ofChristianity
CHAPTER FIVE
99
99 99
103 109 120
126
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF UNITY FOR THE CHURCHES AND FOR
THE WORLD 126
Macmurray's Faith Experience 127
The True Value ofChristianity 142
~~~~~~~ 1~
CHAPTER SIX 160
A SIGN OF HOPE: THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT 160
Unity Through Service 160
The Ecumenical Movement 164
Unity Through Doctrine and Service 175
CONCLUSION 184
BIBLIOGRAPHY 188
2
INTRODUCTION
On his very first day of school, a five-year-old boy was asked by his teacher what he wanted to be when he grew up. The answer he gave was that he wanted to be "a man of knowledge".l The young boy in question, John Macmurray, certainly achieved his desire. Born in Scotland in 1891, he lived to the age of 85 and spent his whole life becoming, in his terms, a man of knowledge. He spent most of his adult years in the great halls of learning, first as student and then as lecturer and professor. Despite a wide range of interests, ranging from science to art and from politics to international relations, his main focus was on philosophy, and a mark of the knowledge that he attained in that field is that he was at various times in his academic career a lecturer in philosophy at Manchester University, and at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, before moving on to become a don at Bailiol College in Oxford. From there he moved to London to become Grote Professor in Mind and Logic at University College, London and completed his academic wanderings at Edinburgh, where he was Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1944 until his retirement in 1958.
Along with such an impressive list of academic appointments, the wide range of Macmurray's publications also bear testimony that we are indeed dealing with a man of knowledge. He wrote fifteen books, covering such issues as democracy, Communism, the mearung of history, science, the relationship between philosophy and religion, and the meaning of
1John E.Costello,John Macmurrqy: A Biograp!?J, Flons Books, Edinburgh, 2002, p.19.
3
Christianity. He also contributed a great number of articles for a variety of publications, and was largely responsible for the BBC's influential series on philosophy and society of the 1930s'. What emerges from even a brief glance at the range of his publications is that Macmurray was no stereotype philosopher, hidden in his ivory tower. He was a person who believed that if philosophy was to be of any real value then it must engage with the social problems of its times. His own experience of serving, first as a medic and then as a soldier, in the First World War, convinced him that the failure of philosophy and also of Christianity to create the conditions where people could live in peace and friendship, called for a fresh approach to the philosophical and religious questions of what it means to be a human person. The courage with which he intellectually addressed the social and political difficulties of his time reveals that being a man of knowledge was not, for Macmurray, an invitation to solitariness, but that learning and knowledge should be used as a contribution to the well-being of the world.
There is a passion to his writing that shows his efforts were not simply about understanding the world, but about changing it? Such a view of the role of learning, and of philosophy in particular, set Macmurray apart from most of his contemporary colleagues, to such an extent that, despite the highly impressive academic positions he held, he can be said to have never really felt at home in the British philosophical culture of his day.
2 It was Kad Marx who famously wrote in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach that 'The philosophers have only interpretedthe world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it". Quoted by H. Kung in Does God Exist, Doubleday & Company, New York, 1980, p.231.
4
At a time when the philosophical agenda was being set by thinkers like Wittgenstein3, Ayer4 and Gilbert RyleS, an agenda which refused to see any significant role for philosophy beyond that of linguistic analysis and verification, Macmw:ray's own philosophical efforts were of wider concern.
He was haunted by the attempt to come to an adequate understanding of human natw:e, and felt that if we could only properly understand what it is to be human then we might more easily find solutions to the many problems besetting society and the world. His efforts received little appreciation from his philosophical contemporaries. Ryle, famous for a book entitled The Concept
of
Minrf, dismissed Macmw:ray for writing and speaking too simply!When Ayer, one of the most famous of the 20th centw:y English philosophers, succeeded Macmw:ray as Grote Professor in Mind and Logic, his inaugw:al lectw:e· was made controversial by his refusal to even mention the name of his predecessor.
The growing sense of academic isolation that Macmw:ray must have felt was perhaps partly lessened by the fact that there were other thinkers, though not in Britain's academic circles, who shared many of his concerns and values. His own philosophical approach was close to that of Martin Buber7,
author of the seminal work I and Thou8, and to certain existential thinkers
3 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951), author of Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (1953).
4 A.J.Ayer (1910 - 1989) was one of the most significant of the logical positivists in English philosophy, and best known for his work,Language, Truth and Logic (1936).
5Gilbert Ryle (1900 -1976) was another of the analytic school in English philosophy.
6Gilbert Ryle, The Concept
of
Mind, Penguin Books, London, 2000.7 Martin Buber (1878 - 1965) was similar in approach to Macmurray in that he saw human reality as essentially relational.
8Martin Buber,I and Thou,T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1970.
5
like Gabriel Marcel9• Macmurray himself was fond of telling the story of his lengthy meeting with Buber, after which Buber stated that there was no significant philosophical disagreement between the two. The only difference between them was that while Macmurray was the metaphysician, Buber was the poet!10
Macmurray's search for an understanding of the nature of human being, one that would be both philosophically and theologically comprehensive and sound, is best summed up in the two books that emerged from the Gifford Lectures11 which he had been invited to give at Glasgow University in 1953 and 1954, The Se!! as Agent and Persons in Relation. In these works, we encounter a thinker who was unafraid to enter into debate with such illustrious philosophers as Descartes, Kant, Hobbes and Rousseau. He was convinced that philosophy had taken a wrong turn with the general acceptance of Descartes' understanding of the human person as a thinker, and that ever since, it had struggled to come to a proper understanding of human nature. The acceptance of the Cartesian thinker had brought about a
9Gabriel Marcel (1899 -1973) was one of the foremost French existentialist thinkers and another who wrote about the nature of interpersonal communion.
10John E.Costello,]ohn Macmurrf!Y: A Biograpf?],p.322.
11In 1885 Lord Gifford made provision in his will for a series of lectures to be given at the major Scottish universities on the topic of natural theology. Since their inception, the Gifford Lectures have become a significant intellectual event in the question of religion.
Lectures are given in the universities at Edinburgh, St.Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen.
The fu:st lectures were given in 1888-89. A lecturer is given two successive years for his lectures. The lecturers have included a prestigious and broad cross-section of scholars from such fields as religion, philosophy, physics, and history, and have included scholars such as Etienne Gilson, William Temple, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and, more recendy, Alasdair MacIntyre and Stalliey Hauerwas, to name just a few. The lectures are often published and achieve significant stature in the intellectual world.
6
dualism between mind and body which made it impossible to account for the unity of human life. For Macmurray, philosophical notions of the human person had, Slice the time of Descartes, either focussed on a mechanical or an organic perception of the world and of humanity. Neither of these views, though partly true, presents an adequate understanding of the universe or of the human person. The mechanical approach was to see the universe as a determined order of reality, where everything is put in motion and held together by mechanical forces and laws of nature. The organic understanding of the universe was one where everything was seen as part of an unfolding evolutionary process of life energies. While not denying that human beings can partly be presented in these terms, Macmurray felt that history shows the dreadful results of conceiving the human persons in such a limited fashion. Neither a mechanical nor an organic concept of the human person reveals the essential dignity of human beings. To be human is to be more than a machine or an organism; it is to be a person.
The greater part of both The Se!f as Agentand Persons in Relation is devoted to an exposition of Macmurray's vision that the universe is more than mechanical and organic but that it is ultimately personaL Modern philosophy, in absorbing Descartes' view that the self is a thinker, could give no real account of the fact that we are both persons and agents. By taking the idea of agency as the starting point of an examination of human nature, Macmurray believed that we might come to a fuller understanding of the universe and our place in it. In examining the nature of the human person from the standpoint of agency he comes to the conclusion that the deepest truth of our humanity is not that we are thinkers or simply part of a great organic process beyond our control, but rather that to be human is to be a person living in a personal world. More significantly, to discover the
7
personal nature of reality is to come to perceive that our relationship with the world, with other human agents and with God is also personal. To be fully human is to live with the intention of living out our communion with the world, with others and with God in such a manner that peace and goodwill becomes the hallmark of our human lives. Such a personalist philosophy as that expressed by Macmurray will have significant implications in the political, ethical and religious spheres, and many of his writings serve as a guide to what those implications mean in the practical living of human life.
Part of the reason for Macmurray's philosophical isolation can be traced to the fact that, through his search for the meaning of human being, he came to the conclusion that to be human is to be religious, and that the message of Jesus reveals to us our own truest nature. While many dismissed his views as simply another indication of his philosophical unreliability, he himself felt that his greatest achievement was in articulating a coherent account of human nature which gives due weight to the religious dimension of our lives. Macmurray was convinced that the personal and religious nature of all reality is perfectly expressed in the actions and the teachings of Jesus. Christians, therefore, are called to manifest the truth of the personal nature of life, through their own commitment to the intending of communion and fellowship in the world. They are called to continue God's action in history, to be witnesses to the fact that we are created to live in personal relationship with God and with one another.
Sadly, the evidence of Macmurray's life suggests that, despite the depth of his own faith in the person of Jesus, he was no more at home within the institutional structures of the Churches than he was with the kind of philosophy being conducted in the British academic world of his day. His
8
major problem with the institutional Christian Churches was that, in his view, they had lost sight of the radical nature of Jesus' teaching. In their emphasis on the task of achieving salvation in the next world they failed to grasp that Jesus was concerned with establishing the Kingdom of God here on earth. As a result, they had fallen into the very same dualist notions that impoverished so much of contemporary philosophy. By asking their members to spend their life in preparation for heaven, they had absolved themselves from finding solutions to the problems of this world.
This failure of the Churches to be faithful to the life and teaching of Jesus was most clearly seen in their inability to offer a word of hope during the great social crises of Macmurray's lifetime. The experience of both World Wars showed that, rather than calling people to live out the communion that God intends for the world, the Churches had compromised the truth and had themselves gone along with the political, national and ideological divisions of the time. Macmurray's own experience of this failure of the Churches was to have a profound impact on his own relationship to Christianity and to the Churches. Towards the end of the First World War, while on home leave from the killing fields of France, he was invited to preach at a Church in London. He used the opportunity to call his listeners to focus on the need for Christians to be at the vanguard of the effort to seek justice and reconciliation after the war had ended. His words were not well received, and Macmurray was shocked at the hatred he felt coming from a group of people who called themselves disciples of Jesus. The trauma of this experience was so great that, after the First Wodd War had come to an end, he made a decision not to be a member of any of the institutional Churches, a decision he remained faithful to until he joined the Society of Friends in 1959.
9
Despite his refusal to participate in the institutional life and worship of the Churches, Macmurray's personal faith in Jesus continued to be of the greatest importance to him. His faith drove him to continually challenge the Churches to rediscover the real significance ofJesus' life and teaching and to accept their task of building communion between peoples whose actions are more often guided by fear of one another than by love. He passionately believed that only by committing themselves to finding practical expressions of communion and love in the world could the Churches properly claim to be made up of disciples of Christ. Only by taking practical steps to incarnate the message of Jesus in the contemporary world could the Churches avoid being irrelevant· to the need for human beings to properly understand their own nature.
Some of the practical suggestions that Macmurray offered to the Churches were at the time, and are still today, controversial. While many other Christians shared his view that the lack of unity among the Christian Churches was not only a scandal but also a major obstacle to the proclamation of the message of Jesus, his solution to the problem was to argue that unity between the Churches could not be brought about through doctrinal agreement but only through actions in the world that create fellowship and justice. His assertion that only a complete separation of the structures of Church and State could prevent the Churches from being compromised in their proclamation of the dignity of all human beings did not garner much support from other Christian thinkers of his time.
Likewise, his belief that true Christianity was irreconcilable with the economic practices of his day meant that he managed to alienate many well- fed Christians who saw no contradiction between attending Church on Sunday and seeking as much economic and political power as possible during the rest of the week.
10
It is now more than twenty-five years since the death of Macmurray, a distance that perhaps allows us to begin to properly assess the real significance of his thought. Was the fact that he was never quite at home in the world of either his philosophical or Christian contemporaries a sign that he failed in his efforts to provide a coherent philosophical and theological vision of human nature? Or was he perhaps a prophetic figure, uncomfortable as prophets tend to make us, reminding each of us of the dignity of our human being, and offering the world a way to overcome the horrors of division and war? Does the history of the world and of the Christian Churches over the last twenty-five years offer us any hope that Macmurray's views are no longer to be seen as either politically naive or religiously utopian?
What cannot be doubted is that the world in which we live continues to be marked by the divisions and competitiveness that Macmurray so abhorred.
Human beings continue to be treated as objects, political and ideological divisions still lead to violence and death in many parts of the world, and there is little sense of the emergence of a world community that might overcome the manifold social problems of the contemporary world. Yet, having said that, there are sure signs that the concerns that marked Macmurray's academic and personal life, are being taken up by other thinkers and by the Churches too.
From a philosophical perspective, although it remains true that much of philosophy remains limited by relativism and by an undue humility regarding what it might reasonably express about the nature of reality, there are a
11
growing number of philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre12 and Charles Taylor13, who share Macmw:ray's belief that it is not possible to understand the natw:e of human being without appreciation of the central fact that to be human is to be part of a community of human beings, and that community is largely responsible for our human identity, as well as providing the context in which we can understand the ethical natw:e of our lives.14 We see similar developments in political philosophy, much of which no longer takes for granted Hobbes' view that human beings gather together in community out of fear and the desire for self-preservation.
It is, however, from a theological perspective that one can see the surest signs that Macmurray's understanding of the natw:e of the human person is being carried forward. Despite the fact that most Christians willnever have heard of Macmurray, it can be said that the vast majority of Christians and Churches have come to share his awareness of the sinfulness of division among the disciples of Jesus. The effort of the World Council of Churches
12 Alasdair MacIntyre (b.1929), in his famous work After Virtue (1981) argues that much of the crisis affecting contemporary moral philosophy arises from the failure of modernity to properly account for human nature, and proposes that we return to Aristotle's notion of virtue ethics, which he believes reveals a more substantive explanation of human nature than those offered in most contemporary ethical accounts.
13 Charles Taylor (b. 1931) is best known for his major work Sources
0/
the Self (1989), which offers an historical and critical study of the modem concept of the human person.14 MacIntyre concludes his work After Virtue with a call to create communities which are ethically guided by the sense of what it means to live a good and virtuous life: "What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horror of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope". Alasdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1981, p.263.
12
to achieve the unity of all Christians has itself developed, as we shall see, along views very similar to those expressed by Macmillray. The recent assemblies of the World Council of Churches, as well as those of the Faith and Order Movement and Life and Work Movement, have revealed a growing theological awareness that the question of communion is much more than simply a practical expedient in terms of missionary effectiveness.
There is a deeper understanding that being in communion with others is the expression of the deepest truth about religion and about human natille.
From a more personal perspective, I have long shared Macmillray's dissatisfaction with the limitations of much of both modern and contemporary philosophy. As a Christian, I have also felt deep sympathy with his criticisms of the institutional Chillches and their faililles to live out the call to create communities where all can feel at home. I too have longed for an understanding of human natille that is both philosophically coherent and able to guide the Chillches towards an adequate appreciation of the central importance of friendship and communion in human life. It is because the experience of real communion is always fragile and easily destroyed that we need to base Oill commitment to fellowship and friendship on more than a pious desire for unity or an emotional plea to tolerate one another. While I make no claim that Macmurray has been the only thinker to point us in the right direction regarding the significance of communion with others1
s,
I do believe that his stringent philosophical analysis of human natille, combined with his own profound faith in the15 Stanley Hauerwas (b. 1940), for example, is a contemporary theologian who approaches the subject of moral theology from the perspective of the significance of communion and of the importance of narrative inmaking community possible. Among his works are A Community
of
Character, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1981 and The Peaceable Kingdom, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1983.13
person of Jesus and his desire for the unity of the Churches, offers us an approach that can still deepen the roots of our own commitment to the unity for which Jesus prayed and died.
Given the wide scope of Macmurray's interests, it is necessary here to focus on only a limited aspect of his work. I have chosen to take a close look at his argument that it is by seeing the human person as agent rather than as thinker that we can best come to a correct understanding of human nature.
I will next examine his writings on the significance ofJesus and the need for the Churches to actively work towards the creation of real communion in the world. This examination will help to reveal why Macmurray argued so vehemently that the unity of the Churches should only be brought about through practical social action and not through doctrinal agreement. It is my intention in this thesis to show that, while his call for the Churches to be united for the sake of the Kingdom of God is based on his philosophical understanding of human agency, his refusal to accept that unity needs at least a minimum of doctrinal agreement among Christians as to the nature of Jesus and to the nature of discipleship reveals a logical inconsistency in terms of his own philosophical understanding of action. I willconclude that if only Macmurray had accepted that the search for doctrinal agreement among the Churches was itself a living example of what he calls reflective activity, then he would have recognised that the efforts of the World Council of Churches were remarkably close to his own concern for unity and friendship in the world.
The first chapter of my thesis, The Crisis
of
the Personal, will be based largely on Macmurray's book, The Se!f as Agent, and will begin with an exposition of Macmurray's notion that many of the social problems of his time are, at least in part, a reflection of a philosophical and religious crisis too. It will14
explain why he believed that the fundamental problem of the day was the difficulty of coming to a proper understanding of the nature of human being. I will examine Macmurray's analysis of the philosophies of Descartes and Kant and see why he felt that their major mistake was to attempt to understand the human person as thinker rather than as agent. In so doing, they had made the theoretical more important than the practical, and were thereby unable to offer an adequate explanation of human action. I will next describe Macmurray's argument that it is only by seeing the human person as agent rather than as thinker that we can avoid the dualism which is inherent in most post-Cartesian philosophical thought. The chapter will also focus on Macmurray's view that, while by taking the self as agent one can philosophically explain thinking, one cannot give an adequate account of agency from the standpoint of the human person as thinker.
The second chapter, The Signijicance
of
Communion, will involve us in a close reading of Macmurray's work, Persons in Relation. Building on his notion that we can best understand human being from the idea of agency, I will explain his argument that as agents we are confronted with the existence of other agents and so with the whole question of relationships. In focussing on the mother and child relationship, Macmurray wants to suggest that all relationships are based on the fundamental attitudes of fear or love. I will describe his argument that, given the fact that our relationships with others will be based on the intention with which we approach them, the question of intention in human action is crucial. This will lead to Macmurray's deep conviction that since by nature we are persons in relation with others, we are only fully ourselves when we overcome our fear of others and relate to them with the intention of creating friendship and communion. The chapter will continue with an elucidation of his argument that our approach to both ethical and political issues will largely be determined by our understanding15
of relationships, and will express Macmurray's dissatisfaction with the political and ethical approaches of Hobbes and Rousseau. The chapter will conclude with Macmurray's explanation that while, to be true to our own human nature, we need to intend communion and friendship with others, there is also a deeply religious significance to the concepts of friendship and commuruon.
The third chapter, The Significance
of
Religion, will continue to focus on the arguments presented by Macmurray in Persons in Relation and will enunciate his view that religious experience is always about community and relationships. I will offer a summary of his rejection of the understanding of religion of both Marx and Freud, views which have deeply affected contemporary understanding of the nature of religion. The chapterwill also examine Macmurray's notion that religion is not only about communion, but that it is properly inclusive too. The intention of religion is always to overcome division and fear, and, given the fact that community life is always fragile and easily broken, religion helps to create the conditions where unity is preserved and deepened. I will then explain Macmurray's distinction between what he terms real and unreal religion. Ifreligion is to be real then it must accord with the fundamental truths of human nature, that we are agents in the world, and that through our agency we intend communion with one another. This will lead us to another fundamental aspect of true religion. Ifour experience as persons is that of agents in communion with others, then our relationship with God must also be personal and concerned with communion and friendship.The fourth chapter, The Significance
of
Jesus, will attempt to express Macmurray's understanding of the person of Jesus, an understanding that is in harmony with the philosophical views already shown in the previous16
chapters. The thoughts of Macmurray on this question will largely be drawn from his book The Clue to History, published in 1938. The starting point will be Macmurray's belief that to be a Christian is not so much to share in a set of doctrinal beliefs about Jesus, but to have some share in the intention that directed Jesus' own life and actions. I will next reveal why he felt that Jesus' intentions and actions can themselves only be properly understood when seen within the context of the history of the Jewish people. The great value of the Jewish religious consciousness, for Macmurray lies in the fact that it sees all action and the whole of history from a profoundly religious perspective. Thus, Judaism manages to avoid the dualistic division, between theory and practice and between doctrine and action, that is to be found in most other religions. The other significant factor that Jesus inherits from the Jewish religious tradition is that religion is concerned with this world and with the establishment of God's kingdom on earth. The chapter will then focus on Macmurray's argument that the clear intention of Jesus was to lead people to be true to their own nature and so to build communities of love and friendship. For Christians, to intend communion and friendship with others is to share in the intentions of Jesus. I will conclude the chapter by examining Macmurray's view that through the compromises that the Churches have made in history, such as the linking of the Christian faith with the powers of the Roman Empire, the Churches have failed to continue to act with the intention of Jesus in seeking the unity and communion that God wills for us.
The fifth chapter, The Significance
of
Unity for the Churches andfor the World, will begin with a description of Macmurray's own personal faith journey, and will attempt to show that his philosophical and theological understanding of the nature of human beings and of the reality of religion, was itself built on a personal relationship and commitment to the person of Jesus. Attention17
will be paid to his decision not to give allegiance to any of the institutional Churches a decision which stemmed from his view that the Churches had, been unable to offer any meaningful answer to the crisis of the First World War. I hope to show that, despite his decision, he remained convinced about the truth of Christianity and indeed continued to be deeply involved in the effort to make the Churches more faithful to the message of Jesus.
The chapter will also focus on a late work of Macmurray's, Search for Reality in Religion, in which he addresses his fellow Quakers, the Society which he joined in 1959. In this book he covers much of the same ground as that discussed in the previous chapter, but I will pay particular attention to what Macmurray considers to be the main failures of the Churches; that in shifting the main focus of Christianity from action to doctrine they fall into dualism, and that by calling believers to work towards the Kingdom of God in heaven they fail to take seriously the need to establish the Kingdom here on earth. I will conclude the chapter by noting Macmurray's view on how the Churches ought to act in the future if they are to have anything worthwhile to contribute to the needs of the world. The major tasks that the Churches must commit themselves to is to bring about the unity of all Christians, to avoid the temptation to seek worldly power and, within the economic and social sphere, to find a practical means of expressing the solidarity of all peoples.
The sixth and final chapter, A Sign
of
Hope: The Ecumenical Movement, will begin with a review of Macmurray's position on the need for the Churches to offer a visible sign of unity to the world, and with his position that such unity can only be brought about through practical social action and not through doctrinal agreement. I will then compare his views with the efforts of the Ecumenical Movement in the 20th century to come to that unity which is called for by God. Particular reference will be made to the18
assemblies of the World Council which took place during Macmurray's own lifetime. It will be my argument that although the Ecumenical Movement has also experienced a tension between moving towards unity through action and through doctrinal agreement, the documents of the World Council of Churches suggest that both elements are needed if unity is to be properly achieved. I will also contend that Macmurray failed to appreciate the complexity of achieving unity even when it is intended by Christians, and that it can be even more difficult to find agreement about what actions Christians should take in the world than it is to come to doctrinal agreement about the nature of Jesus and the self-understanding of Christians. While admitting that the efforts of the World Council of Churches do not necessarily prove that Macmurray was mistaken in his refusal to see any meaningful role for doctrinal agreement between the Churches, I will conclude my thesis by suggesting that Macmurray's argument can be criticised from his own philosophical view of the human person as agent.
Given his view that the person is best understood from the perspective of agency, Macmurray argued that thinking can be described as a form of reflective activity, and done for the sake of action. I will suggest that Macmurray's refusal to see any value in seeking doctrinal agreement points to a logical inconsistency in his own thought, and that if he had seen the . efforts to find doctrinal unity as a form of reflective activity, conducted for the sake of the Kingdom, then he might have viewed the efforts of the World Council of Churches as offering the world a practical image of his own philosophical and religious vision.
19
CHAPTER ONE
THE CRISIS OF THE PERSONAL
The Crisis in Contemporary Philosophy
John Macmurray was invited to give the Giff01:d Lectures at the University of Glasgow in 1953 and 1954. His lectures were subsequendy published in two volumes, The Seif as Agent and Persons in Relation. A careful reading of these texts reveals that they present Macmurray's mature thought on the nature of the human person and on the significance of religion in human life and therefore offer us a way to critically examine his ideas. In the opening chapter ofThe Seifas Agent he offers the reasons why he had chosen to focus on the question of the form of the personal in the Gifford Lectures.
For this choice I had two marn reasons; the first, that it is, in my judgement, the emergent problem for contemporary philosophy; the second, that it directs attention to that aspect of our common experience from which religion springs and is in this respect appropriate for the purpose of the Gifford foundation. For it is characteristic of religion that it behaves towards its object in ways that are suitable to personal intercourse; and the conception of a deity is the conception of a personal ground of all that we experience. If then human reason, unaided by revelation, can contribute anything to theology, it is through a philosophical analysis of the personal that we should expect this to be brought to light.16
16John Macmurray,The Selfas Agent,Humanity Books, 1999, p.1?
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Macmurray is quick to assert that the attempt to express a natural theology in the terms he has just described is problematic. Natural theology is seen as a theology which is based on our common human experience of the world, and which is not dependent on particular religious experiences or a particular faith content. It is rather something which should be discovered by reason alone. Yet many people would deny that a natural theology is
even possible.
In our time philosophers and theologians tend to unite, it would seem, in agreement that religion must rest upon its own evidence, and that any knowledge we may have of the divine must be revealed to us in 'religious' experiences whose validity is evidenced by an inner conviction of their authenticity in those to whom they are granted.17
It is Macmurray's view that while both theologians and philosophers tend to see an unbridgeable gap between faith and reason, the whole movement of philosophy since the time of Descartes has moved in the general direction of atheism.
The more closely modern philosophy keeps to its programme, and the more purely objective its procedure becomes, the more inevitable is the atheism of its conclusion. Within the limits of its assumptions no other result is permissible. Yet I cannot accept the conclusion, in spite of its logical necessity...The view that there is no path from common experience to a belief in God; that religion rests upon some special and extraordinary type of experience apart from which it could not arise - this seems to me hardly credible.18
16John Macmurray,The Selfas Agent,p.18.
18John Macmurray,The Selfas Agent,p.19.
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One of the reasons why Macmw:ray finds this viewpoint hardly credible is because, in his understanding, religion is the original and universal expression of the human capacity to reflect on the meaning and purpose of life. While this does not in itself prove the validity of religious belief, it does at least suggest that there is value in coming to a proper philosophical understanding of the nature of belief. He goes on to suggest that by examining the emergent problem of contemporary philosophy, which he considers to be the form of the personal, one will come to a deeper realisation of the centrality of religion in human and personal being, and so move away from atheism to a more theistic vision of reality.
It is clear that the fust task is therefore to articulate in more depth the problem that contemporary philosophy is facing. In Macmw:ray's view there is a clear link to be found between philosophy and the social context in which it arises. The philosophy of any historical period will be at least in part determined by the social realities of that same historical age. It follows that times of significant social change will demand a change in philosophical outlook too; and the history of the 20th century, one of real social and political change, presents a major philosophical challenge to the contemporary world.
We need only recognise the break: with tradition which is apparentin all fields in our own society - in religion and morals, in politics and economics, and in the arts. In such circumstances we should expect to find a break in the continuity of philosophical development, a radical criticism of traditional philosophy and a search for new ways and new beginnings. And this we do find.19
19John Macmurray, The Se!!as Agent, p.26.
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Macmurray suggests that a philosophical response to the contemporary break with tradition can be found in both logical positivism20 and in existentialism21. While offering very different approaches to the need for a new philosophical expression, they share an understanding that the traditional methods of philosophy can no longer be sustained in a radically changed world. Although Macmurray agrees that there is a need to find new philosophical expressions, he argues that both logical positivism and existentialism fail to provide an adequate response to the crisis of the world which he sees as being a crisis of understanding the nature of personal being.
Existentialism has discovered, with sensitiveness of feeling, that the philosophical problem of the present lies in a crisis of the personal;
logical empiricism recognises it as a crisis of logical form and method.
Both are correct, and both are one-sided. The cultural crisis of the present is indeed a crisis of the personal. But the problem it presents to philosophy is a formal one. It is to discover or to construct the intellectual form of the personal.22
20 Logical Positivism was a philosophical movement which began in the 1920s and was very popular for a period of about 30 years. In its focus on verification and the belief that any meaningful statement needs to be verifiable it led to the notion that the assertions of religion and ethics, insofar as they cannot be verified, are ultimately meaningless.
21 Existentialism was a philosophical and literary movement that emerged in France in the aftermath of the Second World War. Jean Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers are among the more famous existentialist thinkers. Philosophically, Existentialism focuses on the uniqueness of human individuality rather than on the notion of abstract universal human qualities.
22John Macmurray, The Selfas Agent, p.29.
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Macmurray suggests that a brief look at the crisis of the personal in terms of contemporary history may enable us to specify more clearly the nature of the questions that philosophy has to respond to if it is to find a meaningful answer to the problems of contemporary society. He declares that two of the major trends in society that point to the real crisis in the world are the growing power of the state and the decline of religious belief and practice.
These two trends are closely related, as can be seen in the fact that there is a growing tendency to seek salvation through political rather than religious authority. It is Macmurray's belief that "the apotheosis of political power involves the subordination of the personal aspect of human life to its functional aspect".23 The two great political movements of Macmurray's time were Communism and Fascism, and the reason he was ultimately so opposed to them is precisely that as ideologies they reduce the human person to the status of a functionary. The political crises of his time were therefore to be understood as largely arising from an inappropriate conception of the nature of the human person.
It is likewise Macmurray's opinion that the crisis in religion and the decline in religious belief can largely be said to arise from a failure to understand human nature. He states that the decline in religious belief manifests and also intensifies a growing carelessness and indifference to the personal values that are most significant for allhuman beings.
Christianity, in particular, is the exponent and the guardian of the personal, and the function of organised Christianity in our history has been to foster and maintain the personal life, and to bear continuous witness, in symbol and doctrine, to the ultimacy of personal values. If this influence is removed or ceases to be effective, the awareness of
23John Macmurray, The Se!!as Agent,p.29.
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personal issues will tend to be lost, in the pressure of functional preoccupations, by all except those who are by nature especially sensitive to them.24
There is, for Macmurray, a clear link between the social crises of the 20th century and the need for philosophy to create an adequate notion of human being. Modern philosophy has, no doubt unwittingly, contributed to creating a world where people are seen as functionaries rather than as persons, and as isolated individuals rather than as beings who .find true fulfilment through being in communion with others. Macmurray suggests that in order to find a way out of the social, philosophical and religious crisis of the contemporary world it is necessary to find a new philosophy thatwill allow us to discover what it is to be a human person.
The form of the personal will be the emergent problem. Such a new phase of philosophy would rest on the assertion that the Selfisneither a substance nor an organism, but a person. Its immediate task would be to discover the logical form through which the unity of the personal can be coherently conceived.25
In order to make the fundamental philosophical shift that will allow us to understand human nature more properly, Macmurray suggests that we need to approach the question of the Self not in terms of the Cartesian thinker, but from the more practical standpoint of the human person as agent. Also, it is necessary to see the human person not as an isolated, individual being but as a being who can only be rightly understood in terms of being in relationship with othe:r persons.
24John Macmurray,The Se!!as Agent,p.30.
25John Macmurray,The Se!!as Agent,p.37.
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The isolated, purely individual self is a fiction. In philosophy this means ... that the unity of the personal cannot be thought as the form of an individual self, but only through the mutuality of personal relationship.
This ... compels us to abandon the traditional individualism or egocentricity of our philosophy. We must introduce the second person as the necessary correlative of the first, and do our thinking not from the standpoint of the'I'alone, but of the 'you and 1'.26
This is the task that Macmurray sets out for himself, and he declares that the remainder of The 5e!f as Agentwill be devoted to the attempt to understand personhood from the aspect of agency while the second volume of his Gifford Lectures, published as Persons in Relation, will examine the significance of the mutuality of the personal.
Romanticism, Kant and Descartes
Macmurray next turns to an examination of the ways that Romanticism has influenced philosophy, and how Romanticism emerges as a reaction to the philosophical ideas of both Kant and Descartes. His hope is that by making a deep study of each of these influential views he might more clearly show why it is necessary to make agency rather than thought the perspective that manifests the true nature of the human person.
According to Macmurray, Romanticism has often been understood as being primarily concerned with matters either literary or artistic. While it was undoubtedly a literary and artistic movement, he prefers to see Romanticism as something that created a revolution in terms of both social outlook and thought. The Romantic philosophy that emerged in eighteenth and
26John Macmucray, The Se!!as Agent, p.38.
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nineteenth century Germany, and particularly the Romantic understanding of reason, can be seen as a response to Kant's philosophy of reason.
Indeed, some of the most notable German Romantic philosophers, such as Herder27, were in fact pupils of Kant. Writers such as Hamann28, Herder
and Lessing29, in turning away from the abstract and scientific notions of reason they found in Kant, proposed rather that aesthetic intuition and the imagination are the purest and fullest form of knowing available to us.30 Given such a view, it is feelings and emotions that are closer to the fullness of knowing than is pure intellect. One should trust more to the power of intuition than to scientific reasoning.
The Romantic understanding of the human person is also radically different from that of Kant. For the Romantics, each person is part of both nature and society. Because each person is social by nature one can suggest that it is culture rather than the laws of science that provides us with the most appropriate means of understanding personal existence. Another significant aspect of Romantic philosophy is its organic view of the human person and indeed of the whole of life. According to the teleological view that is inherent in Romanticism, each individual being is aimed at a
27 Johann Gottmed von Herder (1744 - 1803) studied theology at the University of Konigsberg and while there fell under the intellectual influence of Kant.
28 Johann Georg Hamman (1730 - 1788) was another German philosopher who lectured at the University of Konigsberg.
29 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 - 1781) was an influential figure in the Romantic Movement. He believed that all religions share an equal dignity. No single religion possesses the fullness of truth; rather, they present only moments in the ethical and practical history of humanity.
30cf. John E.Costello,fohn Macmurrqy: A Biogrcrpf!y,Floris Books, Edinburgh, 2002, p.131.
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progressive self-realisation and fulfilment. Indeed, the whole of creation can be understood in this way, so that all things in our world are participating in a progressively unfolding universe. Romantic philosophy therefore encourages the notion of an evolutionary world, where each being aims at both personal growth and at finding its proper place within the wider evolutionary pattern of the universe.
While Macmurray is grateful to Romanticism for offering a view of the human person which gives space to the emotions as a valid form of knowing, he remains unconvinced that their organic and evolutionary understanding of the person and of the universe is finally sustainable. In particular, he believes that Romanticism ultimately offers a diminished vision of human nature, one where each person is only part of a greater evolutionary process. It is precisely such a view that, in failing to take account of the freedom and the dignity of each person, has permitted the great atrocities of the twentieth century. According to Macmurray's understanding therefore, Romanticism can at best offer only a partial explanation of the human person, one which highlights the fact that knowledge has as much to do with feeling as with thinking.
Having examined Romanticism in terms of its reaction to the ideas of Kant, Macmurray is now ready to look more closely at Kant's own philosophical views. He begins by applauding the central place that Kant31 enjoys in the history of philosophy. His is a philosophy that is notable· for the comprehensive unity of its concerns and for the way in which all subsequent
31 Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) is recognised as being one of the most important philosophical thinkers of modem times. Among his works are Cn'tique
of
Pure Reason (1787), Critiqueof
Practical Reason (1788), and Groundwork to the Metap!?Jsicsof
Morals (1785).philosophy has been unable to ignore Kant's vision. MacmUfray believes that Kant's approach to Romantic philosophy was one of critical sympathy.
The major difference between Romantic philosophy and the earlier philosophical views of Descartes lies in the place each gives to the role of the imagination in knowledge. While Cartesian philosophy sees the imagination as unreliable in terms of producing certain knowledge, the Romantics argued that it is precisely imagination .that underlies all experience and all forms of knowing. Kant, while being sympathetic to the role of the imagination, is at the same time critical in that such imaginings must necessarily elude necessary objectivity. Imagination cannot yield certain knowledge.
In turning to a deeper examination of Kant's philosophical. notions, Macmurray acknowledges that he is not offering a sufficiendy detailed criticism of Kant, but rather that "we must confine ourselves ... to those general features of Kant's doctrine which are essential to our purpose".32 However, in order to make sense of Macmurray's criticism of Kant it may be helpful to offer a brief synopsis of the main aspects of Kant's views.33
It has often been suggested. that Kant is responsible for creating a Copernican revolution in philosophical thinking, one that all subsequent philosophers have been unable to escape. He attempted to move beyond . what had been seen as an inevitable dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism. The rationalists had argued that we are able to understand the world by the use of reason while the empiricists had long argued that all our
32John Macmurray,The Se!/asAgent, p.47.
33A good summary of Kant's thinking is to be found in the article on Kant in The Philosophers, edited by Ted Honderich, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 115 -122.
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knowledge must be based on experience. Kant's way forward, and indeed his Copernican revolution, was to suggest that we need to examine the whole question of epistemology from a different angle. Rather than ask how it is that we are able to understand the world, we should ask how it is that the world comes to be understood by us. Instead of suggesting that it is reason or experience that allows our concepts to match the actual nature of objects, in fact it is the structure of our concepts that give shape to our experience of objects. The truly radical nature of Kant's argument emerges when he suggests that we cannot know anything at all of the world as it is in itself but we can only know the world as it appears to us. Iftaken seriously, Kant's view would have profound implications not only for epistemology, but also for ethics and for religion.
Much of Kant's philosophy, particularly in Critique
of
Pure Reason and Critiqueof
Practical Reason, is concerned to show how reason determines the conditions under which experience and knowledge are possible. He draws a distinction between what he calls a pn"orijudgements and a posten·onjudgements.All a priori judgements are based solely on reason, independent of any sensory experience, and therefore apply with complete universality. A posteriori judgements, on the other hand, are grounded in experience and are consequently limited and uncertain. !<ant next draws another major distinction between analYtic judgements and synthetic judgements. Analytic judgements are those whose predicates are completely contained in their subjects; they are purely explanatory and add nothing to our concept of the subject. Synthetic judgements are those whose predicates are wholly distinct from their subjects, and they must be shown to relate to them through some connection which is external to the concepts themselves. Synthetic judgements are therefore informative in that they do tell us something about the subject but they require justification by reference to an outside principle.
Kant argued that synthetic a priori judgements are necessary to provide the basis for much of our human knowledge. Mathematics, arithmetic and geometry provide us with examples of such judgements, and natural science depends on synthetic a priori judgements in order to explain natural events.
Metaphysics, Kant suggests, must also be based on such judgements if it is to offer anything meaningful. But how is it possible to make synthetic a priori judgements at all? This is the crucial question that Kant must answer if his thesis is to be maintained.
Turning first to the question of mathematical principles, Kant suggests that they offer us a clear picture of synthetic a priori judgements at work. Taking the example of a triangle, how can we know that the interior angles of a triangle must add up to a straight line? Our knowledge of this must be a priori, since it applies with complete universality to all the objects of our experience without having been derived from that experience itself. Our knowledge of the triangle's interior angles adding up to a straight line must also be synthetic since, although such knowledge contributes to our understanding of the world, the sum of the interior angles is not contained in our concept of a triangle. Now, if experience cannot provide us with the required connection between the concepts involved, where does our knowledge of the truths of triangles come from? Kant's argument is that such knowledge is imposed by ourselves. We impose, as a precondition on all the possible objects of our experience, conformity with the truths of mathematics. The same holds true for our knowledge of the natural world.
Kant held that the general laws of nature, like mathematical truths, cannot be known to us through experience. These laws of nature are general principles that we impose on everything that we experience. So, rather than suggesting that we are able to know the world through our rationality or
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through sense exper:tence, Kant suggest that it is synthetic a priori judgements that provide the necessary foundations for our human knowledge.
This suggestion leads us directly to Kant's distinction between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world, or the world as it is and the world as it appears to us. All our synthetic a priori judgements apply only to the world as it appears to us. The world as it is in itself is absolutely beyond our capacity to know, since we can never have any experience of it. What Kant is here suggesting is that we can know something of the world as it appears to us, but only because we ourselves impose a meaningful structure on it.
In his attempt to describe the possibilities of knowledge Kant is next forced to confront the question of metaphysics. The difficulty of metaphysics is that it aims to completely transcend experience in the attempt to discover the nature of being and reality itself through pure reason. But if, as Kant suggests, we cannot know the world as it really is, how is it possible for us to have any metaphysical knowledge? It is impossible that we can make any synthetic a priori judgements about things as they are in themselves. Kant's way out of this dilemma is to argue that, as rational beings, we have to think of the world as it is in itself as if our speculations about it are in fact true.
He suggests that although we cannot have any real knowledge of the world as it is, we are forced to posit certain factors that ultimately we can only believe to be true. Among the things that we need to believe about the world as it really is are the ideas that we are substantial beings, that we are free to act in a world that is causally determined and that God exists.
To conclude this basic summary of Kant's approach to epistemology, he argues that most of the things that we take to be most true about ourselves
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are in fact nothing other than expressions of hope that our experience of the world is not meaningless. We are therefore forced to impose order on the world as it appears to us, though with no certainty that there is any connection between the world as it appears to us and the world as it actually is. Itwas perhaps for this reason that Kant himself came to the conclusion that the real value of his philosophy lay in his ability "to criticise reason in order to make room for faith".
Returning now to Macmurray's view of Kant's Copernican revolution in philosophy, while it is clear that he ~eady admires Kant's efforts, he declares himself unhappy with many aspects of Kant's philosophical epistemology. In particular he feels that Kant's distinction between pure reason and practical reason is fundamentally problematic. Given that Macmurray's main concern is to come to a proper understanding of human nature, he argues that one needs to know the precise relationship between pure reason and practical reason, and that a decision needs to be made as to whether pure reason or practical reason is primary. Such a decision would have important implications in terms of understanding human being and human knowledge.
According to Macmurray, Kant's way out of the dilemma as to whether pure reason or practical reason is primary is to suggest a distinction between the roles of understanding and of reason. Understanding is concerned with the world of objects as they reveal themselves to us through the senses. Kant produces a set of categories which can be applied to our sense experience and to imagination and intuition in order to produce knowledge of the limited and conditioned world of objects. Understanding therefore offers us practical knowledge. Reason, on the other hand, concerns itself with the ultimate nature of things. It deals with purely formal concepts and offers
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rules or principles which can impose proper order on the imagination.
Reason, as distinct from understanding, offers us theoretical knowledge.
However, while striving to reach knowledge of what lies beyond the world of senses or the world as it appears to us, reason is ultimately doomed to failure in this effort. The root of this failure lies in the fact that reason cannot actually verify anything beyond sense experience: Nor can it succeed in reaching the 'thing-in-itself which lies beyond the limitations of human categories.
Having interpreted Kant's efforts to express the relationship between pure reason and practical reason as one where they both are necessary but serve different epistemological functions, Macmurray comes to the conclusion that Kant's efforts are doomed to failure. This failure is largely due to Kant's inability to offer a coherent connection between the two worlds that he posits, the world as it is in itself and the world as it appears to us. The idea of the world as it is in itself presumes the primacy of the theoretical in reason while the idea of the world as it appears to us supposes the primacy of the practical. Again, Kant's Critique
of
Pure Reasonpresumes the priority of thought, formal concepts and categories, but his Critiqueof
Practical Reason argues for the primacy of praxis or action. This inability to relate pure reason to practical reason in any meaningful sense means, for Macmurray, that Kant falls into the fatal trap of dualism. He then goes on to make more explicit the reasons for his ultimate rejection of Kant.We must now turn to the criticism of Kant's philosophy as a whole;
leaving aside all questions of detail, however important. There are two major criticisms to be made, one concerning its coherence, the other with reference to its adequacy. The first is that there is a radical incoherence in Kant's method of relating the theoretical and the practical activities of
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